Posts Tagged Under Writing Mamas
Grandma’s House
I never really had grandparents. My mother’s mother and my father’s father died when my parents were still children. I only met my paternal grandmother once and my maternal grandfather passed when I was toddler.
Luckily, my children have a different life. They have three sets of grandparents: Nonna and Grandpa Elroy; Grammie and Grampie; and Grandma and Grandpa Tampa (because they live in Tampa).
This Christmas we are staying with Grandma and Grandpa Tampa. In fact, my husband’s entire family is here to celebrate the holidays. That’s two grandparents, four grown children, their spouses, and ten grandchildren.
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Diamonds in the Rough
One night, after our toddler was asleep, I poured wine for my husband, Michael, and me. I told him that I needed more help with Nicholas. I took his hand and explained that I didn’t want to make it sound like he wasn’t doing his part. I knew I dominated taking care of Nicholas, and I wanted to change. I thought I sounded reasonable.
Michael blew up. He jerked his hand from mine and starting pointing his index finger at me. I was bossy and always correcting him. He wanted to do more but got tired of my interfering. But what really bothered Michael, what really upset him, was he felt he’d lost his wife, his lover and his best friend. For two years, he’d watched me disappear with our son. Continue… »
By Marianne LonsdaleLitquake! Make My Knees Shake!
Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival, kicks off tonight — nine days, 850 authors, 150 Bay Area locations. There are readings in bars, bookstores, boats, and one barbershop! Writing Mamas member Janine Kovac gives us the behind-the-scenes peek at the excitement and amazing amount of planning that goes into this “Woodstock” of the writing world.
I think I have stage fright.
I am so nervous.
I’m not reading (all authors—except for those in LitCrawl—who read in the Festival have had books published within the last two years.) But as a member of the executive committee, I’ll speak at a handful of events to say things such as “Welcome to Litquake!”
This is my first year on the committee. Most of the committee members are published authors or editors of literary magazines. Some are publicists, others are booksellers and publishers. Me, I write my mommy blog and watch my kids. Most of the books I read are written in rhyme (“A comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush.”) Most of my public speaking happens at the park playground: “GET DOWN FROM THERE RIGHT NOW!” Continue… »
By Janine KovacThe Tyranny of an Anniversary
The anniversary ringtone flashed on my screen demanding my attention.
“Remember,” it said. “Today.”
So damn sure of itself.
This isn’t the add-another-notch to the wedding band date, although I’m sure I’ve had a few snarky responses to those as well. This anniversary was a reminder of events that we feel obliged to honor even though honor is not something we like to give death credit for. Why would a mother want to remember her son’s death?
The countdown to his last day dovetails along with the broadcast demands of 9/11’s 10th anniversary the week before. But I’ve been anticipating September 18th since May. His birthday seems like a poor joke in light of our family’s holiday lineup: Mackenzie’s falls on Martin Luther King Day (her initials just happen to be MLK); Tyler’s is Labor Day (you can say that again) and Aaron’s falls on Memorial Day (not funny). Cameron came along three years after Aaron died on – naturally – the first day of spring. Our herald to life renewed. Continue… »
By Kimberley KwokMonkey See, Monkey Poo
It’s a good thing there are three toilets in our home. At any given time there might be three small bums occupying each one. You see we have twin girls who are three-and-a-half and a son who is four. When one has to go, inevitably they all have to go. I realize this is a huge stage in their development. I did a small dance the first time I went to Costco and didn’t have to buy diapers. I’m just wondering when they’ll be able to do it all on their own…pull down their pants, go, wipe, flush, pull up their pants, wash their hands.
They are pretty good at everything but the wipe part, which I don’t really mind that much. It’s when they are all on the potty at once yelling for me to help them, not understanding that I can only wipe one tush at a time. It’s a bit frazzling. I often wonder how Kate Gosselin handled it. Imagine six having to go at once. I hope her two older daughters weren’t into the monkey see monkey do when their siblings were potty training. Maybe they were even old enough to help. Continue… »
By Teri StevensMarriage is Work
A friend of mine celebrates her first wedding anniversary next week and has noticed that the universe has conspired against her. Total strangers tap her on the shoulder to say, “Remember, marriage is work.” Billboards, bus advertisements, email spam from moveon.org—everyone is telling her how hard marriage is. And that the work gets tripled once you add kids to the equation.
“Is it true?” she asked me, since I have been married seven years. Seven years! That’s as long as an Old Testament famine.
Yes, Laurie, it is true. Marriage is work. But here’s the trick: the implication of “marriage is work” (reads like a Marxist manifesto) is that if marriage is work, then the opposite of all this work is sipping mojitos in Tahiti, and reading the latest Oprah book club selection. I would argue that, yes, marriage requires a lot of effort, but there’s also great payoff. To me the polar opposite of being married is being comatose. A coma requires very little effort. I believe there’s also very little reward.
Put another way: a marriage is a garden. We can probably all agree that weeding a garden is hard work. But while one gardener notices how hot it is, how much her knees hurt, how many weeds there are, and what a thankless job it is—gripe, moan, whine—another gardener might notice how nice it is to be in the fresh air. That the feel of dirt in her fists is a sensual experience. That the garden is beautiful after it’s been weeded. Maybe she’s just proud to even have a garden.
You get the point.
(I must admit with all this gardening talk, that I haven’t weeded since 1981, back when I still had cooperative kneecaps. The metaphor is more real to me than the actual act of gardening.) Continue… »
By Janine KovacReflections from Delhi
I remember sitting on a crowded bench in the Delhi train station dripping in 110 degree heat praying for it to cool down. I wondered how it could be so damn hot at 8 p.m. I remember looking at my daughter, Kate, who’d been living in India for two years and noticing how she looked like the other Indians around us who appeared hot, but not drenched like me. I remember feeling relieved that at least my other daughter, Annie, was sweating as much as me even though she was only 25.
I remember thinking age didn’t seem to mediate the heat. I remember wishing I didn’t stick out so much as a foreigner, but the combination of my white skin and wet clothes made that impossible.
I remember endlessly wiping my face with my new orange dupata and worrying I was going to wreck it. I remember Kate telling me not to worry, because the dupatas, Indian scarves, were used to protect against the elements; this included sweat. She told us that the women wore them to shield against sun and wind as well as over their heads for temple visits. Continue… »
By Marilee StarkTo Blog or Not to Blog?
I have been meaning to start my own blog for over a year but kept procrastinating. Which blog publishing tool should I use? How do you start one? Should I get someone to design one for me? What should I write and how often? Who’s going to read it?
On and on, enough questions that ensured I never actually began. Then I saw a link to a blog about a Platform-Building Campaign for Writers. The deadline to enter was in two days time. Yikes! I didn’t even have a blog, let alone the need to raise its platform! But something inside me said that this would be a good thing to do.
So, at my husband’s suggestion I just clicked the sub-heading of ‘blogs’ in my gmail account. There were a number of different templates to choose from. I picked the one I liked the best and wham! I had a blog! It was literally as easy as that. I was so pissed off that it had taken me so long to do something so easy.
But, better late than never.
I entered the Campaign and it has been amazing. A massively steep learning curve but in the mere two weeks since I started my blog, I have gained over 49 followers and had 1,120 views! I am stunned. I have also met the most wonderful group of people, mostly writers, and am having a blast. Continue… »
By Claire HennessyThe True Spirit of Community at Squaw
Jessica O’Dwyer was one of the first women I met when I joined the Writing Mamas. She introduced herself, asked me about my family and my writing and helped me feel I was in the right place. Her insecurities around the quality of her writing were weirdly reassuring to me.
We both applied for admission to the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in 2006. Jessica was accepted. I was not. She had a tough and wonderful week and came back so overwhelmed she could not write for a short period. But Jessica had a story to tell, the story of adopting her beautiful daughter Olivia from Guatemala, and she got back to work, returning to Squaw in 2007 as a stronger writer who had found her voice.
Jessica kept moving forward, improving her writing through classes and workshops. She wrote and rewrote, searching for the story arc that would grab and hold readers. She had two young children and a husband with a demanding job. Sometimes she could only write at night in cafes or at the library after her husband got home at night and dinner had been cooked. It would have been easy to put off the book, to wait until the children got older, until there was more time to write. Continue… »
By Marianne LonsdaleHappiness is Lemonade and Xanadu
My summer vacation took me back to the neighborhood where I grew up. I recalled sweet memories of endless lazy summer days spent frolicking in my best friend’s pool. We’d daydream about our futures – hers of a white picket fence with 2.5 kids and mine of traveling the world and writing the great American novel.
We’d cap off our evenings playing freeze tag and hop scotch with a gaggle of neighborhood kids on the biggest, flattest lawn until our moms beckoned us home one by one. We jumped on our bikes and pedaled home, the air thick with honeysuckle; the buzzing harmony of crickets warming up for an evening symphony.
Upon returning to my old stomping grounds, 30 years later, now with my five and two -year-old daughters in tow, I was amazed to find the neatly manicured lawns and sidewalks once teeming with life, oddly quiet.
We spent one week at my childhood home leisurely walking our dog along the rolling hills, ample time to see and be seen. We saw very few people. It felt like a ghost town. Continue… »
By Laurel Hilton
